Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China

Few historians of technology study non-Western agrarian societies. Francesca Bray fills a large void by showing how technology shaped social relations in late imperial China from a.d. 1000 to 1900. Not only China scholars but all historians of technology must pay attention to her brilliant work. Bray is a historical anthropologist of technology, known for her work on the rice economies of Asia and her collaboration with Joseph Needham on agriculture in Science and Civilisation in China. She uses her expertise to great effect here, reading classical Chinese texts to shed new light on the gender and technology relationship.

Instead of large industrial machinery, Bray examines the small, domestic structures of daily life. The three parts of the book analyze, first, how the house delimited space for Chinese women within the family; second, how the decline of women’s economically vital role as textile workers changed their social status; and third, how women both assisted and resisted patriarchal Confucian orthodoxy’s definition of their reproductive roles. Her sources range from modern ethnographies to historical studies, moral advice books, medical case histories, and, most ingeniously, graphic illustrations.

Each of these “gynotechnics” (Bray’s term) formed a system of interwoven cultural norms, power relations, and economic processes. We are reminded of Thomas Hughes’s insistence on technology as systemic relationships, not individual artifacts. But why is a house like an electrical grid? Because it too comprises connections of elements (walls, doors, shrines, beds, stoves) that define bodily actions, material life, and symbolic content. The Chinese family compound was a ritual space, bounded by a high wall. Geomantic orientation in the landscape channeled cosmic forces properly. Inside, Confucian ritual codes regulated behavior strictly according to kinship and rank. Unlike Westerners, Chinese worshiped their principal gods in the heart of the house, at the ancestral altar and the stove. Even though women were kept tightly secluded, they owned their own property—their dowry chest—and they preserved autonomous spaces within the home. Ancestral spirits guarded the male hierarchy, but the Kitchen God was both a spy of Heaven and a feared female primal power, because cooking was a special woman’s sphere. Cooking created civilization by transforming the raw into the cooked. Childbirth took place on the wedding bed, also part of the new bride’s dowry. Seclusion put women under the incessant gaze of their husbands’ families, but it also gave them limited freedom and dignity.

Work connected women with the outside world. Modern observers falsely assumed that foot binding totally cut women off from market networks. In fact, because women’s textiles were just as important as men’s grain for tax collectors and the household economy, weaving was the prime Chinese metaphor of civilization. From the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, however, textile production moved out of the home into urban workshops. Male merchants and weavers took over the dominant distribution networks, leaving women only with the despised, tedious work of silkworm cocoon growing and cotton spinning. This development partly explains the great paradox of Chinese economic history: why did women’s status apparently fall just as the commercial economy expanded? Foot binding and seclusion spread and women lost inheritance rights at the same time as cities grew, cash transactions flourished, and agricultural production advanced. Bray’s detailed examination of the textile industry adds a valuable gender perspective, so often neglected by economic historians. Also, by recognizing long-term change in culture, she avoids the historian’s common complaint about ahistorical holistic functionalism.

As women lost their economic role, orthodox moralists increasingly stressed their reproductive functions. This third and most fascinating part of Bray’s book links demographic and cultural history with a wide-ranging discussion of Chinese concepts of the body. Bray’s most striking argument concerns infanticide and abortion. Despite Confucian patriarchal insistence on producing male heirs, medical literature approved of herbal...